1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a service provision system for providing services on the basis of requests from service users (users) and a service provision method executed in the service provision system, and to an information provision control system and an information provision control method for providing service information to users through lateral linkage across two or more sorts of business fields.
The term “community” in the present specification generally refers to a group consisting of two or more users grouped based on predetermined criteria. Examples of the “community” can be a group consisting of users sharing a certain preference (or having a commonality about preference), a group consisting of users having purchased a certain commodity during a predetermined period of time, a group consisting of users having shopped at a certain shopping mall during a predetermined period of time, and so on, and include both groups voluntarily established by users and groups set based on statistical information about purchase of merchandise or the like by information providers or the like except for users.
2. Related Background Art
As means for users to receive services of some interest, it is common practice to provide a service together with services related thereto (for example, to provide a means for application to a tour and a means for application to a travel insurance simultaneously, to provide wine from France at a French restaurant, and so on). In the case of recent commercial transactions through the Internet, a Web page about one service is prepared while embedding therein hyperlinks to Web pages about services related thereto in advance, in order to establish lateral linkage across two or more sorts of business fields. For example, a Web page for application to a tour is provided with an embedded hyperlink to a Web page of an insurance company for application to travel insurance.
In the conventional method of providing services to users through lateral linkage across two or more sorts of business fields, however, the service providers needed to prepare relations among services to be linked, in the form of links of URLs in advance or needed to affiliate with a major service provider for comprehensively providing services. Even if the service providers prepared these links or affiliated with another service provider, types and ranges of providable services had to be fixed to some extent, which posed the problem that the users were given limited choices for services to be provided.
On the other hand, there existed the conventional concept of communities (groups consisting of two or more users grouped based on predetermined criteria), and some of such communities were operated so as to interconnect servers scattered over a network to make linkage of transmission of information among such servers. In order to maintain interconnections of the system, the users in such communities had to prepare relations among two or more systems to be linked, in the form of links of URLs in advance or had to affiliate with a major information provider for comprehensively providing information.
However, there was the problem that extremely complicated works were needed for the users and information providers in communities to construct the link information or the affiliation relation for maintaining the interconnections of the system.
In view of the problems in the prior art as described above, an object of the present invention is to implement timely service provision or information provision better suited for users, while reducing the efforts to construct the link information or affiliation relation to be prepared for linkage with many service providers (or information providers), for both the service providers (or information providers) and the users.